Review of “Windup Girl”
The winner of the 2009 Nebula and 2010 Hugo awards for science fiction and fantasy novels, Paulo Bacigalupi’s Windup Girl, represents a quandary. It well-deserves recognition and acclaim but is it science fiction or fantasy? Most of the reviews I’ve read place the work in the former genre and compare it to William Gibson or Bruce Sterling. Others fudge the issue by labeling the novel ‘dystopian’ or ‘bio-punk.’ All of these are clever dodges of the central issue of the novel: while impressively grim, compelling, and lyrical it is certainly hard to believe from the perspective of a Newtonian universe.
More on this in a moment.
First, you want to know if this book is any good. It is. Think China Mieville set on the Pacific Rim. Think Neil Stephenson disillusioned by science, engineering and capitalism. Think about a world where the Oil Age is gone, a world where genetic modification of plants, animals and even humans is common place - a world that is slowly picking up the pieces after the collapse of what the novel terms the Expansion Era. Set in a dystopian future Bangkok, the eponymous character of the novel is Emiko, an gene-ripped servant abandoned to survive in a city terrified of her kind. The story is told through many other perspectives, the most important being Anderson Lake, a representative of a large agriculture company hunting for genetic food resources; Hock Seng, a Malaysian Chinese refugee who runs Lake’s cover operation in Bangkok, the SpringLife kink-spring factory and Kanya who works for the kingdom’s “white shirts,” the environmental ministry which is charged with the protection of the kingdom from all genetically modified threats. Filled with ghastly diseases and bloody riots, Windup Girl presents the least attractive world I’ve ever desperately wanted to visit.
Which is to say, there is a lot going on in this propulsive story. I wouldn’t classify the Windup Girl as a page-turner, it’s simultaneously too meditative and gruesome for that, but it is a fairly easy read. It’s also a story that honestly sticks with you. The characters are not sympathetic but they evolve in believable ways throughout the story. The resolution is somewhat predictable but given the mood Bacigalupi expertly cultivates also inevitable.
Which leads me back to my first statement: Bacigalupi is not a science fiction writer. He is more concerned with the mood and style of his world then the particulars. A cursory examination of reader reactions to the novel reinforced some of the questions that tugged me out of the book as I read. After oil, the economies of the world continue by exploiting a variety of other power sources, most of them mechanical in nature. The wealthy are able to use coal-burning automobiles, others get by on spring scooters which are powered by the compressed kinetic energy systems similar to what the Lake character is manufacturing. For bigger loads, Megadonts are employed, enormous gene-ripped mastodons trained to power mechanical turbines. Someone in a message board wondered why this future’s genetic engineering allowed for the recreation of mammoths and synthetic humans but not hacked plants that expire hydrogen for fuel cells. Good questions but I, as a reader, was largely unperturbed by them. The vision of this novel is one of springs, fly wheels and lots and lots of biologic carnage. This is a visceral book, a book filled with desperate people forced into impossible dilemmas. This is Weird Fiction, where the creation of a striking and resonant fictional reality trumps working out how each kink in the spring fits into the other.
Read this book and appreciate it for what it is and the possibilities is fleshes out. Don’t ask it to explain any of its wonders.
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